The term “war or terror” rings all the wrong bells with international public opinion these days because of the way it has been misappropriated by President Bush to justify invading and occupying Iraq, demonizing Hamas, Hezbollah and similar organizations and generally refusing to have anything to do with anyone else he dislikes. It is a great pity because terror is no figment of a right-wing imagination. It is real, as people in too many countries know to their terrible cost — in Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, Algeria, Spain or Lebanon. They are merely some of the more high-profile targets of the men and women of violence.
Because it is real, so is the struggle to defeat it. There is a war on terror. The fact that there is no obvious link between, say, the Tamil Tigers and Colombia’s FARC militants or Al-Qaeda and ETA — or equally that so many people find it unpalatable to agree with anything President Bush says — does not diminish that fact. The increasing sophistication of the terrorists’ operations and the international flow of funds, equipment and information between individual terror groups as well as between them and their supporters means that governments and institutions around the world have to engaged together to fight this scourge. By and large, they are. An example last week was the arrest in Italy of some 30 Sri Lankans suspected of running a Tamil Tiger fundraising racket in the country.
Saudi Arabia is playing a full part in the war. This country, as readers know only too well, has been a prominent target of Al-Qaeda’s global campaign of murder and intimidation. The danger has receded in large part because of effective intelligence work but also because ordinary people here, revolted at the terrorists’ barbarities, have come to understand that the ideological drive behind Al-Qaeda has nothing to do with Islam, that it is indeed a perversion of it. But the war is far from over. Al-Qaeda has changed tactics but it has not vanished. The minute the authorities were ever to relax their vigilance it would again pose a serious danger. The war is an ongoing one.
That that is so is seen in the revelation by Interior Minister Prince Naif that the net is closing in on Al-Qaeda’s financial backers in the Kingdom. Identification and punishment of such people will be a major blow to Al-Qaeda. As the prince said, “without financial backing, terrorists could not have moved as they did”.
There is a view that the war against terrorism is impossible to win, that as soon as one terrorist cell is exposed and rooted out, another springs up. It is not inevitable. Germany eventually won its war against the Baader Meinhof terrorists, Italy against the Red Brigades. They are no longer a threat because in the end their ideological appeal collapsed (and also because in the case of the Baader Meinhof group the demise of East Germany removed a major source of funding and support; finance and support, as Prince Naif notes, is important).
New terrorists may appear with new fantasies to attract the alienated and disenchanted but old ones have been beaten; existing ones can be as well. They will when the ideological appeal behind them dies. That is why the intellectual struggle with Al-Qaeda is of the greatest importance.
